Author(s) from Durham

Abstract

Concentrating on the rich tradition of graphic culture that permeated Scotland’s universities during the long eighteenth century, this essay argues that student lecture notebooks were a sophisticated form of scribal media. I reveal that they were inscribed, assembled, bound, bought, sold, disassembled, edited, annotated, pirated, plagiarized, and circulated in a manner that transformed them into tools through which students learned to interactively manage knowledge on paper. In following this path, I transform student notetaking into a dynamic activity that played a central role in shaping the knowledge economy so characteristically associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.